Focusing on high-stakes realism as opposed to soap is new hospital drama The Pitt – streaming on NEON. It might be the best American drama series Travis Johnson has seen in years.
Hospitals are a perennially popular setting for TV dramas for some very obvious reasons. Life-or-death stakes abound. As viewers, we’re familiar enough with the setting (who among us has never set foot in a hospital?) but the arcana of medical jargon and procedures keeps it exotic for most viewers. And hospitals have a built-in reason for the case-of-the-week formula: you never know who is going to come piling through the emergency room doors, or with what injury or malady.
The Pitt, NEON’s hotly anticipated new medical series, eschews that case-of-the-week formula, instead presenting us with a single 15-hour shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital—echoes of 24 right there, with its “real time” conceit. The Emergency Room is nicknamed The Pitt—hence the title—by head attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinavitch (Noah Wyle), much to the consternation of the managerial team, who find it distasteful, and kvetch about the hospital’s 8% satisfaction rate among surveyed patients.
Robby, our protagonist, gives few fucks, delivering a quick rant about the pressures his team operates under in a profit-and-publicity driven medical facility: a nursing shortage, a lack of beds, no time for in-depth patient care, staff burn out, and on and on and on. When we meet him, a few minutes before this specific scene, he notes that this job leads to “…nightmares, ulcers… suicidal tendencies…” to a fellow doctor who very much looks like he’s about to take a fatal shortcut from the hospital’s roof.
And that’s what sets The Pitt apart from your rank-and-file medical dramas. It’s about medicine at the coalface: driven, committed doctors and nurses doing the best they can under incredible stress, with limited resources, in a system driven by profit rather than patient well-being.
It moves like a bullet; recent medical dramas, such as Grey’s Anatomy and New Amsterdam, have leaned towards the soapy, with as much time spent on the ensemble’s personal lives as the medical emergencies they contend with. The Pitt recognises that there’s no time for that; there’s simply not a spare minute for that kind of self-indulgence. What matters is what the characters do in any given second; every choice could be fatal for someone.
Which is a hell of a crucible for a passel of medical students and interns to get thrust into, including neo baby Javadi (Shabana Azeez), battling to shoulder her mother’s expectations; fresh-faced and bright-eyed Melissa (Taylor Dearden), who you just know is going to get a thousand yard stare before long; and country kid Whitaker (Gerran Howell), the first of his family to go to university, and desperate not to drop the ball.
Their supposed mentors, including sharp-tongued, sarcastic Dr Langdon (Patrick Ball), and coolly professional Dr Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) do their best, but recognise the stakes, both for their patients and their own sanity; don’t go expecting a Scrubs-style heart to heart to whack a band-aid on bruised feelings.
The obvious antecedent here is, of course ER, both in terms of Wyle’s presence (he played young gun doc John Carter in that series) and the choice to put the focus firmly and unflinchingly on emergency medicine. Creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill is an ER veteran, of course; he won a Humanitas Prize for the episode “There Are No Angels Here.”, which saw the characters hie off to a Darfur refugee camp for a brief and brutal tour of duty. It’s interesting that the contemporary American emergency medicine we see in The Pitt is a closer echo of that particular ep than anything else, such is the current state of the US health system.
And though Wyle is not playing Carter again, there’s a metatextual element in play by simply showing the formerly fresh-faced Wyle now, in this role, haggard, beaten down, and at the end of his tether, like a Dr Cox bereft (well, mostly) of wisecracks. Any connections to current… uh, news stories regarding healthcare in the States are left as an exercise for the reader.
But putting that aside (and given there’s currently a lawsuit by ER creator Michael Crichton’s estate on the decks, we probably should) The Pitt is great television. Genuinely great. Fucking great, and believe me, I’m a tough sell. The propulsive pacing, the great cast (there’s not a flat note in the entire ensemble, and it’s a big cast), the commitment to showing the current situation of the American health system as it is, the moments of black humour carefully deployed to leaven the nigh-ceaseless anxiety… it’s a superb work.
Forget ER; the more compelling and apt comparison is Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, another harrowing account of the hell of first care medicine and the toll it takes. I don’t say that lightly, nor this: The Pitt might be the best American drama series I’ve seen in years.
